So much for common wisdom

Ireland.com - The Irish Times - BREAKING NEWS / EU main source of foreign investment in Ireland

The EU continues to be the main source of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the Republic, according to the CSO (Central Statistics Office).

This kinda runs counter to the argument - which I was inclined to agree with - that Ireland's tacit support for the war in Iraq, viz. allowing US military planes to land at Shannon, was somehow necessitated by the risk of otherwise alienating investors from the US. Of course, the article goes on to note that there may be

...indirect routing of US investment via other countries.

So maybe we're still being "forced" into the stopover decision.

procrastination, geek style

The trouble with writing a tool to go through the spam bucket throwing out joe-job responses and virus-bearing mails is that I'm more likely to let it fly when half-written than to figure out some more things it could automatically delete. And when it flies, it takes a long, long time to get through the source data:

3464 of 19259: Mail Delivery Subsystem <MAILER-DAEMON@avp-mail.gin.ru>
removing spamassassin markup
text/plain
message/delivery-status
message/rfc822
contains spam 18.442/5
3465 of 19259: Mail Delivery Service <postmaster@henderson.inet.fi>
removing spamassassin markup
text/plain
message/delivery-status
text/rfc822-headers
3466 of 19259: postmaster@goucher.edu
removing spamassassin markup
text/plain
message/delivery-status
message/rfc822
contains spam 8.414/5

Only 15793 more to go!

this english language stuff is tricky

US President George W. Bush told a news conference this afternoon he refused to "negotiate with myself in public".